


When Mama's Home

by toastweasel



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Butch Mama, Found Family, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Queer Themes, and i will portray RSD and ADHD as designed, aubrey is my smol diaster adhd bisexual and i love her, because I am as always on my butch/gnc bullshit, my little gay heart sang when Mama was introduced and then it continued to sing for 36 episodes, sometimes family is an elder gay filling her old ski lodge with strays and calling them her guests, tw on implied homophobia and also the word dyke being used as a slur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 04:37:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20924288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastweasel/pseuds/toastweasel
Summary: Sometimes people in a small West Virginian town talk. More often than not what they’ve got to say ain’t particularly nice. Mama knows that more than most.





	When Mama's Home

**Author's Note:**

> I slammed all 36 episodes of TAZ: Amnesty in two weeks, read the entire Mama tag in a night, and my brain portraying Mama as one of the old butches of color who haunt my local lesbian bar filled me with the gay courage needed to come out of fanfic hiatus and write this thing.
> 
> Also gayprophets portrayal of Mama, because she is gruff and soft and gnc and I'm really just a useless lesbian at heart. Let butches be soft 2kforever. 
> 
> Mama tugs on my inner baby butch heartstrings, and Aubrey is far more relatable as a ADHD Disaster than I’d like to admit. Also as everyone knows by now I’m a slut for elder gays mentoring younger gays, especially when both are female bodied, so HERE WE ARE I GUESS. 
> 
> (Unbeta'd)

Mama’s rasp shushes quietly against the wood of her most recent sculpture, the sound barely audible compared to the din of the night forest beyond Amnesty Lodge. She smooths her hand over the pass a moment after to check the surface and, dissatisfied with what she finds, goes in with the rasp again. Sawdust filters down over her hands and onto the concrete floor as she files away the jagged angles and rough edges left by her axes and chisels, honing the rough wood nymph under her hands into the lithe creature of her sketches.

She notices Aubrey at the workshop doors before Aubrey announces her presence. It wasn’t hard to do. Aubrey is about as subtle as a firecracker, and twice as loud. Even tonight, as the cicadas and crickets loudly thrum their tune, Aubrey’s feet had crunched along the gravel path down from the Lodge. Besides, with the shed doors thrown wide open, Mama had noticed the motion-activated floodlights flick on and backlight her the entire way down.

Mama lets her watch, seemingly transfixed by the careful movement of the rasp as it bites into unwanted wood and how the older woman brushes away the sawdust after each long, purposeful strong. She lets it go on about five minutes, then finally gravels out,

“Can’t sleep?”

Aubrey starts, then shakes her head. She’s quiet, which is never a good sign. “I saw the light and—”

“C’mon in then,” is Mama’s gruff invitation. The girl is clearly troubled, if she’s up this late at night. Mama knows those kinds of nights well. Those have been her nights for the past thirty years. They’re the kind that find her in her studio at half past two, rasping roughness off a wood nymph’s outstretched arm.

Aubrey slinks off the door frame and into the room, stepping into the warm light with uncertainly and trepidation, just like she did when she first arrived at Amnesty. Unlike that first night, she’s softer, no lipstick or stage make up, her Lady Flame outfit switched for ripped skinny jeans and one of her seemingly endless rotation of goth punk t shirts. Despite her uncharacteristic nervousness, Mama sees Aubrey look around the shed-cum-workshop-cum-studio with a large measure of curiosity.

“You can poke ‘round if you want, but remember that if you break it, you buy it,” Mama advises her gravely. “And watch the sparks. There’s enough sawdust in this room to light us up like a Roman Candle if you snap wrong.”

Aubrey breaks out into a grin and makes a show of shoving her hands firmly into the pockets of her ratty, patched hoodie. Mama smiles back easily and continues to rasp as Aubrey inspects the table saw, the grinding wheel, the band saw. She tries, and fails, to surreptitiously lift the cover off the scroll saw so she can peak underneath.

The older woman doesn’t necessarily keep track of her as she works, but her fight-honed senses let her know vaguely where Aubrey is as she works her way around the room. She moves on from the saws to Mama’s workbench, the one scattered with tools and sanding blocks and old mugs of half-drunk coffee. Aubrey begins to regain her usual reckless courage; she unrolls waxed canvas to display the chisels in their tool rolls, leafs through Mama’s stash of sandpaper, picks a dead blow mallets up off the wall and test the swing.

Mama switches from rasp to file. “You’ll put your eye out.”

Aubrey jumps about a mile high, as if she has forgotten her presence there, and hastily puts the mallet back on its hook.

The sculptor chuckles and pats the empty stool nearby. “Pull up a seat, kiddo. Tell ol’ Mama why you’re up so late.”

Predictably, Aubrey clams up again. But she slides onto the stool and hooks her docs into the metal bar around the bottom. She watches as Mama continues to work, but after a while gets bored and picks up a wood shaving to fiddle with absentmindedly. It starts to smolder, and the Aubrey hastily pinches it out between her fingers.

Mama smiles to herself.

The silence is companionable. They’ve known each other a long time, almost a year at this point, but Aubrey is clearly anxious. She fidgets without the stimulation of the wood shaving, leg jiggling, worrying her bottom lip and twisting one of the many rings on her fingers around and around and around.

Mama waits her out.

“So you’re gay,” Aubrey finally blurts out, “right?”

Mama pauses, takes the hand off the wood nymph’s elbow where she’s been steading the sculpture to file it, and gestures vaguely down at herself. “Obviously.”

Aubrey hesitates. Looks at her, in her faded jeans, worn leather apron stuffed with files, and denim shirt embroidered with the brand of some company long defunct. Really _looks_ at the salt in her cropped hair, the chain hidden at her neck, and the calluses on her large hands. Her fingers twist in knots in her lap.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Whole hell of a lot bothers me,” Mama replies easily, and blows sawdust off a particularly stubborn bit of wood. “Hunting abominations every two months, keeping those goddamn Hornets off my property, the fact my goddamn ankle is killing me more often than not these days and that Leo never seems has my coffee in stock. Take your pick. But being gay? Nah. Doesn’t really bother me.”

“No no no no no,” Aubrey hurries to clarify. “I don’t—not that I—um—” She stumbles over her words, trying to compose her thoughts and failing miserably.

Mama doesn’t let that bother her either. She gestures back at where Aubrey had been poking around before. “Pass me some four-hundred grit.”

Silence and a blank stare meets her request.

She resists the urge to sigh. “It’s the fine stuff. Sandpaper. Numbers’re on the back.”

Aubrey bounces off the stool and goes to root around in the sandpaper bin, obviously grateful for the distraction. Mama sits back and rolls the stiffness out of her neck. She feels her age a whole hell of a lot more recently, but she hates it when she feels it in the studio.

A light flicks on across the room as Aubrey grows frustrated and turns on her phone’s flashlight to see inside the box better. Mama reaches behind herself to pick up her coffee and takes a sip, then winces—cold. The half-drunk mug joins the rest of its fellows on the workbench graveyard.

Aubrey finally produces the rest sheet of sandpaper with a flourish and returns it triumphantly to Mama. She thanks her and folds the sheet into quarters, then carefully tears one off and takes it to the wood nymph’s inner arm.

“Why’re you suddenly wonderin’ about me bein’ gay, anyhow? Thought it was obvious.”

“It was—is,” Aubrey corrects herself quickly, flashes a nervous smile. The finger twisting returns. “It’s not that—I—”

She glances out the doors at the Lodge, where most of the lights are off, save for the Lobby. The wide back windows glow gently, homily. “Someone said something about you. In town. When I went to get groceries. Made some nasty comment about you and me and the Lodge and I just…”

She trails off, uncomfortable.

Mama snorts. “Typical. You spend thirty years protecting a town from utter destruction and some homophobe still feels the need to run their goddamn mouth.”

Aubrey smiles hesitantly, like she isn’t sure it’s the right response, and slides back onto her stood with absolutely no grace at all. “How come it doesn’t bother you? What they say?”

Mama doesn’t even look at her as she sands. “Does it bother you?”

“No!”

It’s too quick, almost canned. Defensive. Mama raises an eyebrow. A sheepish expression spreads across Aubrey’s face, acknowledging Mama has seen through her defenses. Mama commits that look to memory. This girl _is _her facial expressions, all teeth and eyebrows. Right now her smile is crooked and her eyebrows furrowed in a way that it makes all of her explosions and overwhelming chatter worth it.

This is _her kid._ The lost kid she brought into Amnesty Lodge and gave a home. The kid who lights the fireplaces every night with her magic without being asked, who flirts with Dani in the garden under the guise of helping, who makes the grocery run for Barclay then flies out to fight abominations and comes home and passes out on the couch from sheer exhaustion.

The kid with a heart of gold who just wanted a place to belong.

The kid she saw herself in.

The kid who is kept up by nightmares and racing thoughts and, apparently, rage at the thought of some degenerate badmouthing Mama in the general store.

Mama clears her throat against the sudden lump there. “I’m old enough to fight my own battles, sweetheart. You don’t have to be gettin’ made for ol’ Mama.”

Aubrey’s response is tight, her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. Mama realizes with a flash that this isn’t about concern for her at all.

This is about Aubrey.

Mama is old. Even she knows that. She has salt in her hair and her joints don’t work like they used to. She’s had years to form the thick skin she wears like armor, protective calluses against the world. She forgets that Aubrey, for all her stompy boots and flashy clothes, is still young. Offensive, not defensive. A fragile patchwork of queer bravado and magic, thrust into a situation that would make even the most hardened adults turn and flee.

Mama puts down her sandpaper.

“Aubrey,” she says evenly, and turns on her stool to face her, “what did they say about you?”

Her face darkens and she looks away in shame. Mama leans forward and sets a large hand on her knee in an attempt to be comforting, grounding. She reads the twist of emotions across her face and tries to look beyond them to the young woman underneath.

“They called me a dyke,” she finally whispers, bottom lip quivering. “They said...horrible things. About you and me, Dani, about everyone else here at the Lodge. They…” She looks up at the ceiling and Mama can see the tears glittering in her eyes. “It doesn’t, matter, I know. They’re fucked. It’s West Virginia, people be like this. I know. I know! I just…”

She gestures in frustration, out of words or the ability to deliver them.

“Just cuz it’s West Virginia that don’t make it right,” Mama says softly, wisely, “and that don’t make it hurt any less, no matter how many times you’ve heard it said.”

Aubrey chokes. Mama reaches out an arm and Aubrey falls into her. Mama rubs her back as Aubrey shivers against her, crying in the manner of all those who have tried for so long to be strong only to have it all crumble underneath them.

It breaks Mama’s heart. Aubrey shouldn’t have to be strong. She should be out laughing with friends, getting into mischief at the local queer bar while drunk on too many whiskey cokes, maybe even continuing her to therapy to deal with the loss of her mother.

She shouldn’t be slumming around the radio quiet zone because Mama asked her to stay.

She presses a kiss to Aubrey’s pompadour. Slowly, her shaking stops and the sniffles begin. Aubrey pulls away to swipe a sleeve angrily against her face, smearing her already runny eyeliner. Mama tisks, catches her chin in her hands, and buffs away the last traces of black with a licked thumb. Aubrey wriggles and wrinkles her nose at the overwhelmingly parental action.

“Why don’t you help me clean up for the night?” Mama asks, releasing her chin and nodding to a broom and dust pan in the corner.

“Okay.”

Aubrey goes to get them as Mama carefully logs her hours worked in a small, leather bound network. Mama sweeps and Aubrey holds the dust pan.

“See that box over there?” Mama points at a small, obviously repurposed Amazon box stationed at the back of the workshop next to all the bottles of wood glue. “Tip the dust into there. I reuse it for wood filler.”

Aubrey does so. She peers at the box and the glue and when she turns around, she’s smiling cautiously. “Think we could roll some sawdust into balls so I can try lobbing them at bom boms and make them explode?”

She knows Aubrey’s using humor as a defense, looking for distraction in the work they share, but enough feelings have been shared for the night. Sometimes the release is healing enough.

She lets Aubrey rebuild her walls, and a grin cracks over Mama’s old weather face.

“That’s my girl.”

**Author's Note:**

> No idea if this is going to become a regular thing but hey, comment if you'd like it to be and maybe I'll ignore my novellas and write more Mama instead.


End file.
